The RWC comes back home

Today's the day. 24 years on from the year our cup was won and it's back home again. Some (me) would argue that the intervening years have been a fairly terrible time for NZ rugby. The birth of the tri-nations, emergence of super rugby, the abolishment of the NPC, the removal of tours, yearly trips to play England at Twickenham. All appear to have left us with an All Black team that is invariably dominant over others in all but tournament rugby, (ignoring 1995 when the greatest all black team ever was robbed of victory by food poisoning). Overseas teams virtually never come to visit us any more and if they do they send teams full of kids that get thrashed. Then they only play a couple of tests too and disappear. No proper tours either, gone are the days when you could watch the mighty Bay take on the Wallabies. We play too much unimportant, pressure-less rugby as a nation against teams that don't care half as much as we do and we play the same teams too often. The last important games outside of a World Cup were on the tour to Sth Africa in 1996. That was momentous, magic and historic.

Somehow after this latest World Cup is either won or lost, we have to get into the mindset of playing important games again. The relentless Tri-Nations series is junk, has too many games and needs to be reformatted to include more teams and be played less often. We need tours back again so players understand how hard it is to win 7 games on the trot. We should be visiting more nations and actively spreading the game with big tours. We must encourage teams to visit us. We should stop stealing the island nations best players and encourage them to play the game themselves. The NPC needs to come back and be a proper league format without mental divisions. Super rugby shouldn't have anything to do with franchises but should be the best four teams from each of the country's leagues that year. Encouraging real competition in each league. Loads more I could write but it's sounding like a rant now.

If we are to win this World Cup, what we need is a big dose of luck, Richie fit for all the games ('cos for some reason we haven't managed to find one other no.7 in the whole country who can be his backup), some super biased refereeing, Dan's kicking boots on for the whole tournament, and JK back again. God I miss JK.